Madame Radioactive

This article is all about Marie Skłodowska Curie also known as Madame Curie. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.

In a true way, we can say Curie family as a Nobel family as they left a legacy of five Nobel Prizes. Marie Curie received prizes in Physics (in 1903) and Chemistry (in 1911). Her husband, Pierre Curie, shared the 1903 Physics prize with her. Their daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, received the Chemistry Prize (in 1935) together with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In addition, the husband of Marie Curie's second daughter, Henry Labouisse, was the director of UNICEF when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1965) on that organization's behalf. No other family to date matches the Curie family's record, although there have been several with only two laureates.

Highly inspired by the work of Henri Becquerel on radioactivity, Marie and her husband Pierre Curie started their own work on Uraninite, formerly known as Pitchblende an ore of Uranium, the mineral was Uranium-rich thus it was obvious that it should have some radioactivity, but they surprisingly found that its level of radioactivity was much more as compared to Uranium indicating that it must contain other radioactive substances. While working with Uraninite they managed to extract two previously unknown elements Polonium and Radium, both more radioactive than Uranium.

After the discovery by Marie and Pierre Curie of radioactive elements Polonium and Radium, Marie continued to investigate their properties. In 1910 she successfully produced Radium as a pure metal, which proved the new element's existence beyond a doubt. Not only that but she also documented the properties of these radioactive elements with their compounds.

Radioactive compounds became important as sources of radiation in both scientific experiments and in the field of medicine, where they are used to treat cancer.

She was the first to coin the term radioactivity, while in 1906 Pierre Curie died in a Paris street accident she continued with her research on this field, and only under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. In 1920 she founded the Curie Institute in Paris and in 1932 the Curie Institute in Warsaw both remain major centers of medical research. During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals. Marie Curie died in 1934 at the age of 66 in a town of France due to aplastic anemia from the exposure of radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radiological work at the field hospitals during World War I.

This historic photo is often regarded as the ‘most intelligent photo of all time’ was taken in October 1927 at Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, where the world’s most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory.